


Mourning Dove

by Platform 13 (freshneverfrozen)



Series: Hope County Bird Watching [4]
Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 5
Genre: Contains AU one-shots, Deputy, Eli Palmer - Freeform, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Reader-Insert, at some point, reader - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 12:48:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15930755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freshneverfrozen/pseuds/Platform%2013
Summary: Eli sees your sins for what they are.Or,A mostly non-linear series of oneshots involving the handsdown best bean in Hope County, Eli Palmer.





	Mourning Dove

Alone was easier, you had decided. Alone was when they couldn’t ask you for more, couldn’t clap your shoulder and thank you for what you’d done. They called you some kind of savior, like some kind of messiah come to beat back hell in Hope County. But when you closed your eyes and the tears started to fall each night, they fell because they kept you human. Something dark and strangling burned at the scored flesh beneath your collar, a blue-hot flame that flared high with each new request, each new ineptitude from people too stupid, too lazy, too - 

“Deputy?” 

You knew that voice. 

It eased placidly through the red snarl that throbbed between your ears with a hand laid upon your shoulder, somehow cool inside the stifling bunker as though Eli had just come in from outside. That hand touched the bare skin of your shoulder and you thought of a buoy, reminded of images of the striped ones floating on the water, tipping this way and that, sometimes thrashed but never thrown over. Impossibly heavy if one were to cast their arms around it but constant, never sinking. Steady always steady. 

If it took Eli by surprise when you turned and clasped him to you, pressing yourself close and twisting your hands into the heavy canvas of his shirt, he never showed it. The breath your sudden embrace drove out of him passed through the hair at the top of your head and his heart thrummed under your ear as you listened to him living. He didn’t hesitate, not like the others, and when he touched you it was never for your attention, but to remind you that he was there. There was another dog in this fight. His arms folded over your shoulder blades and rested there until eventually the breath settled in his chest again, steady enough that you could keep pace, time yours to his. 

He said nothing but your name. People seemed to forget you had one, as though imagining you as not quite human helped convince them that you weren’t killable like they were, that you didn’t mind killing. You killed so that they didn’t have to, though when that choice had been made, you had not been a part of the voting body. They had taken your life from you, had stolen your future, had poured blood on you and poured and poured. You could feel the sticky heat of it on your skin. Always there, always crawling inwards. No amount of showers could wash it away. 

“Hush now,” Eli says in a voice like air, faint, hardly there even when you looked, “Breathe through it.” 

Breathing was so much easier when you wanted to do it. Tears burned at the corners of your eyes when you dared a glance at his face. You couldn’t bring yourself to say his name, but you tasted it, like you tasted sugar when cookies were still in the oven, there but not. 

Eli raised his hands and studied the edges and trails of your face. He looked for something, though what you couldn’t be sure. A dozen times you had seen those fingers testing, trying, searching over the map on his table in the command room. On your skin, the pads were cold from the night’s chill and your eyelids fluttered as they passed close at the corners to swipe away tears. 

“I’m sorry,” you said. It was a weak sound, a broken one that left you wondering why you had said it at all. People weren’t supposed to know you cried. Eli, you supposed, was different because he understood. You saw it in the softness of his brow and felt it as his palms curled under your jaw, the very tips of his fingers dancing in smooth, slow circles beneath your ears. It should have tickled. You’d have thought it would have made you laugh instead of strangling the breath out of you. 

He smiled and you were thankful when the sadness got lost somewhere in the tangle of beard. 

“We’re all sorry for something,” he told you, “It’s not even our fault some of the time.” 

There was something you wanted to say, but your lip crumbled under the weight of it and you choked on the words. One side of your face chilled as his breath passed over it. It was the last you felt before the heat of the bunker closed in around you and you reached for Eli again with frantic hands. 

An anchor in the storm. 

Swept under and gone. 

  



End file.
